Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [163]
He flushed. “Oh, I’ve been meaning for the longest time to mention that pie. I thank you for that pie.” Short pants, on a woman of her age. From what he could see, she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Better late than never. If recent trends continue, maybe I’ll bake you another one next year.”
He looked at her long and hard, wondering frankly if they would both be here next summer. After a certain point, you had to think that way. “Miss Rawley,” he declared, “I can’t say as I’ve ever seen short pants on a woman your age.”
She looked down at her knees—which were maybe a little pale and knobby, on second thought. If one were to pay attention. She looked back up at him with a girlish grin. “I got hot, Mr. Walker. I got inspired by the UPS boy. He drives that truck in nothing but his swimming suit. I figured if that’s legal, then surely an old lady can take a pair of scissors to her old khakis once in a while.”
Garnett shook his head. “Dignity is the last responsibility of the aged, Miss Rawley.”
“Fiddlesticks. Death is the last responsibility of the aged.”
“Don’t get fresh with me,” he warned. “And don’t expect to see me running around in short pants, either.”
“I’d sooner expect to see a pig fly, Mr. Walker.”
“Well, good, then,” he said. But then asked, “Are you saying I’m a pig?”
She crossed her arms. “Are you saying I’m immodest?”
“If the shoe fits,” he replied curtly.
“Self-righteous, tedious,” she said. “There’s a couple of shoes you can try on.”
That was it, then. They had stooped to name-calling, like a pair of grammar school children. He took a deep breath. “I think I’m finished here.”
“No, you’re not,” she said firmly, looking at him with a menacing eye. “Tell me what’s wrong with me. Let’s just get it out. All these years you’ve been picking at me like a scab. What have you really got against me?”
She stood there fearless, daring him to tell the truth, exciting him toward actually doing it. Garnett turned the thought over in his mind and sighed. With profound sadness, he understood that he could never tell her the answer because he didn’t know it himself.
He said, feebly, “You don’t act normal for your age.”
She stood with her mouth a little open, as if there were words stuck halfway between her mind and the world around. At last they came out: “There isn’t any normal way to act seventy-five years old. Do you know why?”
He didn’t dare answer. Was she really seventy-five, exactly?
“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Considering everything—the whole history of things—people are supposed to be dead and buried at our age. That’s normal. Up till just lately, the Civil War or something, they didn’t even know about germs. If you got sick, they slapped leeches on you and measured you for a coffin. I wouldn’t doubt but hardly anybody even made it to fifty. Isn’t that so?”
“I suppose it is.”
“It is. Our mammaw and pappaw got to keep their dignity, just working right up to the end and then dying of a bad cold one day, with most their parts still working. But then along comes somebody inventing six thousand ways to cure everything, and here we are, old, wondering what to do with ourselves. A human just wasn’t designed for old age. That’s my theory.”
He hardly knew what to say. “That’s one of your theories.”
“Well, think about it. Women’s baby-business all dries up, men lose their hair—we’re just a useless drain on our kind. Speaking strictly from a biological point of view. Would you keep a chestnut in your program if it wasn’t setting seeds anymore?”
He frowned. “I don’t think of myself as obsolete.”
“Of course not, you’re a man! Men